Slop is not necessarily the future

That's true, but I think there is a gray area in between. As things scale up in one way or another, having high quality is important for both #1 and #2. Its hard to extend software that was designed poorly.

The question where experience comes in is when quality is and isnt worth the time. I can create all sorts of cool software I couldn't before because now I can quickly pump out "good enough" android apps or react front ends! (Not trying to denigrate front end devs, it's just a skill I dont have)

Certainly, "enough" is doing a lot of work and things get blurry, but I think "good enough" is meant to capture some of that. Over building is also a problem. It isn't strictly true that building longer lived things is cheaper over time either, it obviously depends on the specific things getting compared. And if you go 100 years rather than 25 years, you'll have fewer chances to adjust and optimize for changes to the context, new technology, changing goals, or more efficient (including cost saving) methods.

Obviously, there's a way to do both poorly too. We can make expensive things that don't last. I think a large chunk of gripes about things that don't last are really about (1) not getting the upside of the tradeoff, cheaper (in both senses) more flexible solutions, and (2) just getting bad quality period.

> The people who typically have the most negative things to say about AI fall into camp #2 where AI is automating a large part of what they considered their art while enabling people in group #1 to iterate on their product faster.

I am in both camps. Always have been.

Code janitors about to be in high demand. We’ve always been pretty popular with leadership and it’s gonna get even more important.

Treat code design and architecture as the thing that lets your slop canons (90% of engineers even pre-ai) move fast without breaking things

My output is org velocity.

The public doesn't care about the code itself, they absolutely care about the quality and experience of using the software.

But you can have an extremely well designed product that functions flawlessly from the perspective of the user, but under the hood it's all spaghetti code.

My point was that consuming software as a user of the product can be quite different from the experience of writing that software.

Facebook is a great example of this, there's some gnarly old spaghetti code under the hood just from the years of legacy code but those are largely invisible to the user and their experience of the product.

I'd just be careful to separate code elegance from product experience, since they are different. Related? Yeah, sure. But they're not the same thing.

> economic forces will drive AI models toward generating good, simpler, code because it will be cheaper overall

Economic forces are completely irrelevant to the code quality of AI.

> I believe that economic incentives will start to take effect and AI models will be forced to generate good code to stay competitive amongst software developers and companies

Wherever AI succeeds, it will be because a dev is spending time on a process that requires a lot of babysitting. That time is about the same as writing it by hand. Language models reduce the need to manually type something because that's what they are designed to do, but it doesn't mean faster or better code.

AI is rubber duck that can talk back. It's also a natural language search tool. It's training wheels for devs to learn how to plan better and write half-decent code. What we have is an accessibility tool being sold as anything and everything else because investors completely misunderstand how software development works and are still in denial about it.

Code quality starts and ends with business needs being met, not technical capability. There is no way to provide that to AI as "context" or automate it away. AI is the wrong tool when those needs can be met by ideas already familiar to an experienced developer. They can write that stuff in their sleep (or while sitting in the meetings) and quickly move on.